Seonam Water Resource Recovery Facility

Addressing Excess Flow and Biological Nutrient Removal through One System

As climate change shifts weather patterns, waste removal facilities have been forced to deal with wet weather events causing larger and more frequent inflows, often overwhelming the capacity of receiving plants. Korea’s largest waste removal facility, the Seonam Water Recovery Center located in Seoul, functioned as a conventional sludge plant unable to deal with peak wet weather flows and lacking any type of biological nutrient removal.

Rather than constructing the conventional two separate treatment and wet water flow systems to address these two problems, Seonam overcame these challenges by introducing Tomorrow Water’s Dual-Use Proteus™ system. This first-of-its-kind, dual-use filter design implements a single compact high-rate filtration system to treat excess flows up to almost 150% of its original design capacity while co-functioning as a primary filter in normal weather.

Additionally, as Seonam is a denitrifying plant with low bioavailable BOD in its influent, it aimed to conserve as much BOD as possible while preventing large solids from getting into other parts of treatment. To address this, Tomorrow Water’s Proteus™ primary filter was installed with a larger 8mm media to reduce the TSS & BOD removal rate through primaries, conserving more carbon for downstream denitrification​.

2020 Wet Weather Filter Performance for the Seonam Plant, Average of 12 total Wet Weather Events

In its first year of operation, Proteus™ demonstrated successful performance during 12 excess flow events, meeting permits with no violations, while delivering:

·      94% solid waste removal

·      81% biological nutrient removal

·  >78% of incoming BOD to pass through to the carbon-limited biological train

With the help of Tomorrow Water’s Dual-Use Proteus™, Seonam was able to meet state regulations for nutrient removal and ensure plant functioning during peak flow events through a single filter, shrinking space and energy expenditures by converting both treatment processes into a single system.